Filming the Notes: Audiovisual Strategies in Popular Music Composition and Production

Practices of composing and producing a song bear similarities with filmmaking, particularly the stages of development, mise-en-scène and montage. This particular topic, when approached at scholarly level, becomes suddenly superficial. Not that it is scarcely analyzed, but even authors themselves tend to take for granted that a song shares some representation strategies with an audiovisual text. Musicologists can elaborate on these concepts, but their analyses tend to be mere parallels and not rigorous comparisons. When instead we try to elaborate on defined strategies of audiovisual representation, we feel the lack of exhaustive research models. The present article, along with the author’s recent work (particularly Martinelli-Bucciarelli 2023), aims at being an opportunity to (begin to) fill this gap, allowing reflections on specific filmic strategies applied to popular music. The case-studies will be the so-called “focus of the songs” (Marconi 2009) and the application of montage theory (particularly Eisenstein’s) on music production.